A massive and thriving colony of bees is now living in the walls
of an abandoned outbuilding in “Silo City,” the former
industrial site at the corner of Ohio and Child streets in
Buffalo.

“Elevator B,” as the new hive is called, won a
design competition organized by the School of Architecture and
Planning’s Ecological Practices Research Group. The
competition was sponsored by Rigidized Metals Corporation,
Rigidized Metals CEO Rick Smith and colleague Jeff Eder, who own
the site.

The members of the winning team are Courtney Creenan, who
graduated from UB in May with master’s degrees in both
architecture (MArch) and urban planning (MUP); Scott Selin and Lisa
Stern, both of whom graduated with an MArch in May; and Kyle
Mastalinski and Daniel Nead, who will receive combined MArch and
MUP degrees in 2013.

Bees, of course, are under enormous environmental and physical
stress, and are perhaps less well-understood than they should be,
although in his day, St. John Chrysostom wrote that the bee
“is more honored than other animals, not because she labors,
but because she labors for others.”

The designers say their intention was not only to design a
structure to house the bees, as the competition rules called for,
but to offer a way to educate the public about bee work and its
contribution to our ecological system.

The result is Elevator B, a 22-foot-tall, free-standing tower
made of steel and covered with one-of-a-kind Rigidized®
stainless-steel panels that were fabricated by RMC:LAB, a division
of Rigidized Metals, and whose hexagonal shapes were inspired by
natural honeycomb. Inside the structure is an innovative “bee
cab,” or bee elevator, constructed of cypress and glass,
which will house the colony and provide it with protection and
warmth.

The bee cab typically will be in a raised position so visitors
stepping into the tower can look up and watch the colony from below
through a glass window. The bees enter the cab through holes near
its top, about 10 feet above the ground in its raised position. The
cab can be lowered to the ground to permit the beekeeper to attend
to the health and safety of the bees.

The exterior panels have holes of varying density to allow for
an atmospheric experience for human visitors and to provide sun
shading for the bee residents.

The students built the tower in the architecture school’s
Material and Methods Shop. It will be moved to its new site this
week to be assembled and raised. The bees will be relocated from
their current colony to Elevator B at the end of June.

As part of the competition, four teams of UB graduate and
undergraduate architecture students worked through the spring to
design habitats in which the entire “living body” of
the colony—thousands of bees and a huge honeycomb—could
live long and prosper.

The participating teams were directed by Christopher Romano, UB
clinical assistant professor of architecture, and Martha Bohm and
Joyce Hwang, both assistant professors of architecture.

In 2010, Hwang famously designed and built an innovative
structure to house bats and raise awareness of their enormous value
to the ecosystem and of white-nose syndrome, a fungal disease that
so far has killed more than 1 million bats throughout the
country.

Hwang explains that the competition to design the hive was a
three-phase process that began with a 24-hour charrette (an intense
period of design activity) from which four semifinalist teams were
selected. The second phase culminated in the teams’
presentation of schematic design proposals from which a jury
selected two teams to continue into the final round of
competition.

The two finalist teams presented detailed proposals, including
construction drawings and cost estimates. Elevator B emerged as the
winning project.

It is one its designers call “an iconic gesture
symbolizing the regeneration of the Silo City site, both naturally
and economically” because the material property of the tower
represents the cluster of material manufacturers around the site,
and the colony of bees are being rescued from an abandoned
industrial building due to be renovated.

Rigidized Metals Corporation has assisted the School of
Architecture and Planning on a number of design projects and, in
concert with Smith, has made the buildings and grounds of Silo City
available to the school for several experiments in design, student
studio presentations, project construction and special events.